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I have too much stuff. You probably have too much stuff, too. And she does…and he does. You know that people in this country have a problem accumulating too many things when we have TV shows like HOARDERS, HOARDING: BURIED ALIVE, STORAGE WARS, STORAGE HUNTERS, AMERICAN PICKERS, PAWN STARS, HARDCORE PAWN, COMBAT PAWN, PAWN KING, PAWN QUEENS, AUCTION HUNTERS, AUCTION KINGS, AUCTION PACKED, AUCTION HOUSE, AUCTION MAN, AUCTION SQUAD, GARAGE SALE, GARAGE SALE KINGS, CELEBRITY GARAGE SALE…you get the gist. We now have so much stuff, we’re entertained by watching how other people store and sell all their stuff. And we tell ourselves “I’m not so bad…I still have a path to my refrigerator.” or “Those people collect junk—I, on the other hand, collect valuables.”

Right.

Okay, so things around my place aren’t piled so high that I can’t get to the refrigerator—if that were the case, I wouldn’t have to worry about going to the gym—BUT I’m appalled at the way things around me seem to multiply when I’m not looking, how every nook and cranny seems suddenly to be full, how I tend to hang on to things that I will probably never need, and if I do need them, I won’t be able to find them!

When I got out of college, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I was just starting out, so I didn’t own enough things for it to be junky. But then my hobbies started to take over: books, canvasses and painting supplies, sewing notions and fabric. And for people like me who always want to be prepared, it was comforting to have things that might come in handy in an emergency, or if a neighbor rang my doorbell. It was worth the time and trouble of stockpiling useful things in order to triumphantly say, “Yes, I do have an extra 9-volt battery!”

I moved from my one-bedroom apartment into a two-bedroom townhome with a one-car garage, and quickly expanded into it. (More furniture, clothes, hobbies.) From there I moved into a 4-bedroom home with a basement and a two-car garage and (you guessed it) filled it up. Fast forward several years, and I was tired of maintaining a big house, so I moved into two-bedroom condo and “downsized.” Luckily, my sister was moving into her first house at the same time, so I gave her all my extra stuff and she was happy to have it. Years later, I’m still content in my yard-less condo, but one day I looked up and realized “creep” had set in: my lower level, which is my guest room and my office, resembled a warehouse from the boxes of books that arrived and I hadn’t made time to sort through and dispense. My upper level was constantly cluttered because I brought work there more and more since writing downstairs in my chaotic office was impossible.

Something had to give. So even though I couldn’t spare the time from my writing schedule, I took the time to coordinate an office renovation I’d been putting off, and to go through every inch of my living space to unclutter and streamline. Lots of bags went to Goodwill, more went into the Dumpster. Once I got over my initial inertia, the process was liberating. My new office is wonderful—I’m hoping (praying) my productivity will soar to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, I’m implementing a new code: when something comes in, something has to go out! And no more stockpiling “useful” items—in the event of an unlikely emergency, Walgreen’s is open 24/7. 🙂

What room/area of your living space is driving YOU most crazy with clutter?

“I was 40 before I learned that ‘no’ was a complete sentence.” –supermodel turned multibillion-dollar-business mogul Kathy Ireland

I read the above quote in the September 2012 issue of More magazine, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I have a terrible tendency to over-commit to things that are important to other people and then kill myself playing catch-up on things that are important to me. It’s taken most of my adult life to learn the power of the word “no” and when to use it. I am sharing a few tips, gentle reader, so that you may learn from my mistakes:

Protect your time. People will spend every second of every minute of every hour of your day if you let them. Don’t let them.

Analyze the motivation. When someone (editor, spouse, friend, neighbor) asks you to do something, ask yourself if they’re doing it because they need your expertise, or if they’re simply trying to get out of doing it themselves.

Beware of Trojan horses. If a friend asks an open-ended question like, “What are you doing next weekend?” you might be thinking the person is about to ask you to join them on a trip to the beach, but instead they might be planning to ask if you can water their plants while they’re at the beach…and check their mail…and feed their cat. The best answer to these sneaky queries is, “My plans are up in the air—why do you ask?”

Delay, deflect, defer. Until you master the art of saying “no”, your best response to being ambushed for a favor is to postpone your answer. A simple, “I’m not in front of my calendar, so I’ll have to get back to you” will suffice.

Go off the grid. If you know you simply won’t be able to say no, then limit your exposure by not answering the phone or your doorbell! If someone really wants to reach you, they will leave a voicemail or send an email, which will give you time to decide how you want to respond.

Operate on your own time-line. Just because someone asks a favor, you don’t have to get back to them right away. In fact, the longer you take to respond, the less likely they are to ask another favor in the future.

Analyze your own motivation. Do you say “yes” to things because you enjoy being the go-to gal? Getting pats on the back? Receiving the “best volunteer” award? If you want your time back, you might have to give up some of the glory.

Meet them in the middle. Sometimes you DO want to help, but you simply don’t have the time to commit to everything that’s being asked of you. In those cases, I try to employ the “No, but…” response: “No, I can’t coordinate the PTA holiday party, but I’ll donate the ham.”

Don’t offer up excuses or apologies. You don’t owe the person asking for a favor a reason for turning them down. “I can’t work it in right now.” will suffice.

Stand your ground. People who are accustomed to people (like you) doing things for them are master manipulators who depend on your guilt to make you give in. Surprise them.

I confess I’m not completely there yet, but I’m working on protecting my time out of sheer self-preservation. If you do/have mastered the art of saying, “No.” as a full sentence, I am in awe. As is the person on the other end of the request—the dead silence that greets you is the person marveling at your aplomb.

What’s the one thing on your plate right now you wish you hadn’t agreed to do?

For me, the worst part of being a writer is I don’t enjoy books, movies, and TV shows the way I did before I wrote fiction for a living. Now my mind is usually jumping ahead, trying to anticipate the twists and turns! And too often afterward I find myself grousing about the plot holes, dropped storylines, or unsatisfying endings. Here are a few ways I would’ve tweaked some familiar movies and TV shows:

SAVING GRACE (TV series): The love triangle between Grace, Ham, and Butch was GREAT. The series, in my opinion, started falling apart when the romantic conflict began to erode. IF I HAD WRITTEN IT, I would’ve drawn the men’s characters as more polar opposites, and kept Grace conflicted about which man to choose. They were all terrific characters, but not great foils for each other. (For the record, though, the un-romantic way the show ended was its inevitable conclusion.)

WITNESS (feature film): Flawless…except it needs a sequel. IF I HAD WRITTEN IT, Rachel and John Book would’ve conceived a child on their one night of passion. Rachel would’ve married Daniel and they would’ve raised the child as their own. But now Daniel has died, and the child (who is an angsty 18-year-old) has left the Amish community to live among the English, and has gone missing. Samuel leaves his home to find John Book to look for his brother, and John eventually gets Rachel to admit the boy is his son. John finds the boy and Rachel agrees he can live with John…or something similarly satisfying. (Although does the fact that the reboot of INDIANA JONES also has a Harrison-Ford-secret-baby plot ruin my idea?)

THE GIFTED MAN (TV series): I thought Patrick Wilson was well-cast as a brilliant but flawed surgeon. And I love Jennifer Ehle, who was the best Elizabeth Bennett ever in the BBC 5-hour version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. BUT the whole ex-wife-is-a-ghost-who-revisits-uptight-surgeon storyline was just…unnecessary. It detracted from the real throughline of the plot, which was that an uptight, upscale surgeon does pro bono work at an inner city clinic. The ghost was the motivator because she guilted him into it. But IF I HAD WRITTEN IT, the surgeon would’ve had a DUI or something, and been sentenced to community service at the inner city clinic. Easy, peasy…and no extraneous ghost. And Margo Martindale, who was shamefully underutilized as the surgeon’s receptionist/assistant should’ve been running the clinic. A gem of an idea, but poorly executed, in my opinion.

LIPSTICK JUNGLE (TV series): I really rooted for this show and heralded Brooke Shields’s return to television, but viewers just didn’t find the three successful female women in Manhattan relatable. Personally, I appreciated the fact that the show portrayed the women at the top of their professional games, but as a writer, I felt they didn’t give the characters room enough to grow. Male OR female, who’s more interesting—the fantastically successful executive who’s fighting to keep their power, or the fantastically successful executive who’s just been downsized and has to start over? The quickest way to build sympathy for a character is to make them an underdog, and there were no underdogs on the show.

I know, I know—it’s easy to critique a show after the fact, after it failed, or after it’s off the air. And I don’t mean to step on the toes of the writing teams that married actors to scripts and sets and advertisers, etc. There’s a lot more collaboration in TV and feature film…and a lot more opportunities for the ideas to get muddied and the throughline blurred by too much input. I’ve seen it happen with my own books—editorial, marketing, and sales get involved with the content, cover, and positioning, and before I know it, my fresh, edgy idea is almost unrecognizable! And what gets put out there feels like a diluted version of my original vision. So…I get how some projects just simply miss their mark, and leave viewers (readers) wanting. Somewhere, someone is probably closing the cover of one of my books saying, “If I had written it…”

Touché. 🙂

Is there a book, movie or TV series, past or present, that you’d like to tweak?

Why in the midst of a deadline do writers have the overwhelming urge to clean?

It’s not uncommon to receive a phone call from a writer friend who’s deep in the despair of a deadline—we all reach out at one time or another to commiserate. It’s also not uncommon to be talking to said panicked writer friend and ask, in response to a strange noise in the background, “Whatcha doin’?” only to be told, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to clean the bathroom floor tile grout with a toothbrush for months, and today I decided it just couldn’t wait any longer.” To which I make supportive cooing noises…because I’ve been there. And because I know that, strangely, cleaning does help to get writers back on track.

It’s tempting to say that tedious cleaning is just procrastination, but if we wanted to procrastinate we could do something less productive—watch TV…go shopping…make a colossal batch of bacon jam for homemade Christmas gifts. (It seemed necessary at the time.)

Cleaning, however, is not procrastinating. Because when we’re compelled to clean, it signals our brains are trying to de-clutter. If we’re honest, the reason we’re worried about and/or are behind on a deadline is probably because we’ve hit an untidy (muddy) place in our story that’s keeping us from moving forward. Scrubbing tile grout with the tiniest implement possible not only satisfies your mind’s desire to “set things right” but (if the writer allows it) the tedium of cleaning also keeps your body busy while your mind sorts through the muddy place in your story.

Repeating, if a writer occupies her hands while proactively clearing a path through the mud of her manuscript, chances are good she will emerge from the bathroom with spotless grout…and a tidier plot.

(A side note here to point out this also explains why writers tend to have breakthroughs in the shower. Cleaning tile grout…shaving your legs below AND above the knee—same thing.)

By the way, you don’t have to be a writer to put this method to the test—no matter what dilemma is pressing on you, you can snap on rubber gloves and start scrubbing your way to clarity.

Have YOU ever reached some sort of revelation in the midst of a rote household chore?

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Bio:

Allison Brennan

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.